Often when people ask me about my work they don’t really get it exactly what I do. I must say when it comes to IT people tend to know only about Technicians, Software Developers … but not System Admins.

It’s also the case of students. A little more than a year ago I had the chance to represent my previous employer at a job fair (at a local education institute). I met many students completing their degree but would only know/think about becoming a Network Engineer or Software Developer. When I tossed them the possibility of becoming a System Admin or Engineer they were kinda perplexed not knowing what is that all about.

Ok … Let’s cut the story short. I came across a nice video tutorial by O’Reilly that describes the activities of a System Admin very broadly.

Incident management is one of the main tasks of a System Admin/Engineer. This video elaborates well by describing how to identify, manage & contain an “Outage”.

The first presenter Avleen Vig describes the career possibilities in connection with “Operations”. This is what actually System Admins/Engineers do – assuring the well-running of operations. Next, John Allspaw gives a detailed presentation on “outages”.

The rest of the presenters do a great job in explaining the technicalities of system & application monitoring to identify/predict outages. They lay focus on the different tools and their usage.

So, if you’re out there wondering if a career in Operations will suit you, General Operations 101 might be good to give you an idea.